In many cases, the end of the year gives you time to step back and take stock of the last 12 months. This is when many of us take a hard look at what worked and what did not, complete performance reviews, and formulate plans for the coming year. For me, it is all of those things plus a time when I u...

"We faced some interesting challenges to make this website genuinely helpful to the wide range of people who might visit it," said Gilman Wong, Chief Executive Officer of Sirtex Medical Limited.

"For example, administering SIR-Spheres microspheres to patients requires the skills of a team of doctors and nurses from medical oncology, hepatology, gastroenterology, liver surgery, interventional radiology, nuclear medicine and radiation oncology. Each discipline is critical to meeting the needs of a patient with liver tumours, but all have different perspectives and informational needs relative to SIR-Spheres microspheres," he explained.

"The same holds true of patients. A patient with primary liver cancer, or hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), has a disease that is quite different from a patient with metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC), who may have already undergone extensive surgical, radiation and chemotherapy treatments before considering SIR-Spheres microspheres," Mr. Wong stated.

http://www.sirtex.com has specialised content for all these diverse audiences, as well as for patient groups, through to those interested in investing in this rapidly emerging technology. Content is also regionalised for Europe, Asia-Pacific, Australia and the Americas.

"In addition to making our website useful to a cross-section of people that is quite extensive for a therapy that is itself highly specific, our other big challenge was to stay current with a rapidly growing research data base, including a number of new studies that may lead to the use of SIR-Spheres microspheres earlier and in a larger population of patients with liver cancers," Mr. Wong added.

Visitors to http://www.sirtex.com may click through to independent sites about SIRFLOX (global) and FOXFIRE (UK), two major studies of SIR-Spheres microspheres combined with chemotherapy in mCRC patients who are at an early stage of treatment, as well as SORAMIC (Europe), SIRveNIB (Asia-Pacific) and SARAH (France), three large studies of SIR-Spheres microspheres alone or in combination with sorafenib (Nexavar®) in patients with HCC.

Selective Internal Radiation Therapy (SIRT), also known as radioembolisation, is a novel treatment for inoperable liver cancer that delivers high doses of radiation directly to the site of tumours. In a minimally invasive treatment, millions of radioactive SIR-Spheres microspheres are infused via a catheter into the liver where they selectively target liver tumours with a dose of internal radiation up to 40 times higher than conventional radiotherapy, while sparing healthy tissue.

Clinical studies have confirmed that liver cancer patients treated with SIR-Spheres microspheres have response rates higher than with other forms of treatment, resulting in increased life expectancy, greater periods without tumour activity, and improved quality of life. SIRT has been found to shrink liver tumours more than chemotherapy alone.

Manufactured by Sirtex Medical Limited, SIR-Spheres microspheres are the only FDA-PMA approved microsphere radiation therapy for the treatment of liver metastases. Over 25,000 doses of SIR-Spheres microspheres have been supplied worldwide.

SIR-Spheres microspheres are approved for use in Australia, the European Union (CE Mark), New Zealand, Switzerland, Turkey and several other countries including in Asia (e.g. India, Korean, Singapore and Hong Kong) for the treatment of unresectable liver tumours. SIR-Spheres microspheres are also indicated in the U.S. for the treatment of non-resectable metastatic liver tumours from primary colorectal cancer in combination with intra-hepatic artery chemotherapy using floxuridine.

"We started a Master of Science in business analytics - that's the hot topic. We serve the business community around San Francisco so we educate the working professionals and this is where they all want to be," explained Judy Lee, Associate Professor and Department Chair at Golden Gate...

There is a huge demand for responsive, real-time mobile and web experiences, but current architectural patterns do not easily accommodate applications that respond to events in real time. Common solutions using message queues or HTTP long-polling quickly lead to resiliency, scalability...

We call it DevOps but much of the time there’s a lot more discussion about the needs and concerns of developers than there is about other groups. There’s a focus on improved and less isolated developer workflows. There are many discussions around collaboration, continuous integration a...

The dynamic nature of the cloud means that change is a constant when it comes to modern cloud-based infrastructure. Delivering modern applications to end users, therefore, is a constantly shifting challenge. Delivery automation helps IT Ops teams ensure that apps are providing an optim...

Modern software design has fundamentally changed how we manage applications, causing many to turn to containers as the new virtual machine for resource management. As container adoption grows beyond stateless applications to stateful workloads, the need for persistent storage is founda...

"CA has been doing a lot of things in the area of DevOps. Now we have a complete set of tool sets in order to enable customers to go all the way from planning to development to testing down to release into the operations," explained Aruna Ravichandran, Vice President of Global Marketin...